Mackay, ID

Mackay is a Custer County town in the Big Lost River Valley, beneath Mackay Peak and the White Knob Mountains. The 2020 census counted 439 residents. U.S. 93 is the town’s main link, running north toward Challis and south toward Arco, while the valley’s irrigation, ranches, and mountain roads set the local scale. Mackay is pronounced “Mackie,” a small detail locals use to distinguish the Idaho town from the financier whose name it carries.

Mackay began as a copper-mining settlement. Miners worked the foothills in the 1880s, then engineer Wayne Darlington built a larger smelter on the Big Lost River and arranged for a railroad spur to reach the valley. The town was platted beside the railroad terminus and incorporated in 1901. A brick schoolhouse, hotels, bank, opera house, churches, and company homes followed. Mining no longer organizes everyday life the way it did then, but the old layout still makes sense: Mackay is a mountain town built around a river valley, a road, and the rail-and-smelter system that brought it into being.